Stone & Sky

Stone & Sky by Graham Edwards is a story about a wall – a wall the size of a world.

Victorian naturalist Jonah Lightfoot, along with his American companion Annie West, is catapulted to the wall-world of Stone following the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883. In this strange, vertical realm, Jonah faces an immortal dragon who has lain imprisoned for a million years, hatred growing inside her. Her name is Archan, and she is free at last. And she’s mad as hell.

But Stone’s precipitous landscape holds more than just magic – it holds memory too. As he journeys through human history and ancient myth, Jonah learns that on Stone the future is rarely certain. More disturbingly, the same applies to the past.

“Graham Edwards has a strong and sometimes bizarre imagination, which he deftly combines with a gift for crafting thrilling action and suspense sequences, topping everything with a dash of humour and an undercurrent of teasing romance” – Amazon

The story behind Stone & Sky

I’d been tinkering with a manuscript about memory, and turning over an abandoned project about a journey along an infinite wall. And I’d always wanted to do a parallel world story. Another huge influence was the heap of SF classics I worked my way through as a youngster – Ringworld, Orbitsville, Riverworld. I think I was seduced all those Big Dumb Objects. So I decided to create one of my own.

The wall-world of Stone is the result.

In the Dragoncharm books I’d explored the idea of a critical moment in our history where the world turned and all the magic went away. Now I wanted to zoom out from that picture, imagine the Turnings that came before and after that moment. What sort of world existed before even the world of charm? And what of the Turnings to come?

So I designed Stone to be not just a giant wall, but a also a storehouse of memory. A sort of index of all possible histories, both mythical and real. When Jonah Lightfoot travels along Stone’s many ledges, he’s moving not just through space but time as well.

If you think all that just sounds like an excuse for a writer to throw as much into the melting pot as he possibly can, maybe you’re right. All I know is, once I’d assembled all the ingredients, cooking the thing was an absolute blast.